The curse of the full auto falling block
Even if house Davion officially controlled the planet many of the local citizens still felt one way or the other about the civil war and its conflicts. They caused a little bit of ruckus about it. There was s small riot and some demonstrations in some of the towns. Most were handled by local law enforcement. Unfortunately, there was one case that hadn’t been dealt with.
Some lunatic with a rifle was shooting everybody. Cops, the city clerk’s lawyers, anyone that wore a uniform or was obviously part of some government controlled organization. The Davion military was busy though, they hadn’t devoted any resources to the problem, and now with more than twenty dead and another dozen wounded Spaceman and Rabbit felt it was their civic duty to help deal with it.
The pair arrived under the cover of darkness. It was a small town in the southern half of an ancient and dry lake bottom, about three thousand people called it home, they had one general store, three gas stations, which was about two too many, one little ice cream parlor, a couple mom and pop restaurants The public library was in sorry shape, and there were several rundown buildings with broken windows and sagging or leaking roofs. Some train tracks ran right through the heart of the town, it was little more than a bulge in the tracks if you looked it up on a map.
On the south side of the tracks was the better part of town, the local schools, were there with a surprisingly successful highs school and beyond that and the city hall the town started to crawl up the side of the lake bed, the nicer houses, the better off people lived there, on the slope leading up to the rim of the empty bowl. On the North side of the tracks was the shady part of town. There the houses were old, and most of them needed painting, many with scruffy mutt breed dogs chained out in the front yard and leaky roofs and toothless old women on their porches peeling potatoes and smoking cigarettes. There was the public park just to the west of this almost trailer park-like suburb which had two baseball diamonds and two soccer fields that doubled as football fields plus a heavily graffitied and unkempt skate park, and about six miles further north of that, at the very bottom of the lake bed, was an airport, or at least it was marked as an airport on the maps but was really just two tin hangars and a cracked runway with a couple old fighter pilots chewing tobacco and swapping stories. Ten miles or so further down the tracks was a farm town, with many fields and to many churches, both towns had slowly spread out and had now started to grow together, where one stopped and the other started was getting harder and harder to define.
Spaceman and Rabbit walked across the track having followed the dirt road from the airport where they had arrived along with the bi-monthly shipment of mail and passed a used car lot, the only one in the town of course, but there it was. The pair stopped to eye an old and dented truck, it was mechanically sound, or so the sticker on its windshield said it was. Spaceman didn’t care whether it was or not, he was impressed by the diameter of its tires and displacement of its engine regardless of how many miles were on its odometer, he wanted to take it out into the dusty desert bottom of the ancient lake bed this town filled and see how far it would go before it got stuck. Rabbit tugged on his elbow and as they collected their duffel bags they came to the first of the cities two stoplights, they made a left turn and headed down Main Street, or it should have been Main Street but the sign identified it as Fourth Street.
After another twenty minutes of walking and slipping down a couple back alleys, they arrived at the local police station, who was now short two of its twelve officers and one of its detectives.
A large, tired and grumpy looking blond woman in uniform was behind the front desk and eyed them suspiciously when she didn’t recognize them as locals. She asked them their business. They asked politely to speak to the police chief then slid her a manila file with some papers. She looked them over in silence, opened the file skimmed it for thirty seconds before her eyes grew as big as dinner saucers, then quickly returned to normal size. She looked the two over again, and then adjusted her hair bun before informing them.
“The chief is asleep right now, do you boys feel this is urgent enough to wake him at almost one in the morning, or can it wait?”
Feeling that the sniper was unlikely to strike at night, and feeling that they wouldn’t be able to catch him at night either, they said it could wait until morning and instead asked if there was a place they could stay that was “under the radar” She directed them one of the two overnight cells, tossed them clean sheets and pillows, gave them the key to the cell so they couldn’t get locked in, told them to ignore poor old drunken tom in the cell next to them and bid them a good night.
They collectively shrugged, figuring they had slept in worse places. They passed drunken Tom on the way to the indicated cell. He was stretched out on his cot, boots, dirty jeans with no knees and plaid shirt with only one button still on, one arm hung over the side, hand resting palm up on the floor the knuckles swollen with arthritis. He drooled out onto his unshaven cheek. Rabbit and Spaceman argued over who got top and who got the bottom bunk, neither wanting top Spaceman ended up on the bottom bunk and Rabbit drug the mattress off the top, found a spring protruding from it, flipped it over, and found a large odd colored stain on the other side, returned it to the side with the spring and flopped it on the floor along wall opposite form Spaceman, then they both slept their feet sore from thirteen miles of walking that evening and night, their duffel bags were tucked out of sight behind the toilet and its small privacy wall at the far end of the room.
Rabbit woke first, yawning he scratched himself. Then he rolled over and scratched some more. From his position on his belly, he stretched, did two quick pushups, and then stood to streatched some more. He was in an unusually good mood despite the accommodations he moved the duffel bags to safety and donned his boots. As he laced up his boots Spaceman woke on his bunk. He stood and scratched under his three-day beard. Rabbit greeted him in a comically bad accent.
“Good morning buddy!”
Spaceman replied with a markedly better Russian accent “Hello comrade”
With that they unspoken agreed to use false accents on the locals, they didn’t need to particularly, but they could, and that was half the fun of it.
The police chief arrived. He greeted the two wearily, eyeing them up and down, gauging them in these troubled times. Would they help him, would they be of use or were they going to be the trouble makers. He could tell from their demeanor and clothing that they were trouble makers and soon mulled over the decision on whether they were good or bad trouble makers. Handshakes were exchanged. He was given a portfolio. It contained only a few papers. They were military enlistment records and dispatches. With lots of heavy black lines blotting out close to a third of their contents. He looked at the papers saw a couple code words he knew that had been handed out to a few local law enforcement agencies to help keep them in the loop. So when he looked back up to the two shit-eating grins he knew more or less who they were and what they could and could not do.
The police chief asked what he could to for them. One, the shorter of the two with a foreign accent asked if he had a sniper problem they could fix. The other taller and darker one with a very thick but unplaceable accent that brought the word hick to mind stated that they liked snipers.
The chief looked from one to the other and then closed the folder, returned it to them and waved for them to follow, leading them from the cell to his office. Wordlessly he handed the pair another folder of his own. They took it and sat. Spread out its contents on the chief’s desk and shuffled through it. Locations, trajectories, ballistics, victims. All his shots had been fired from one general area, and at very long ranges. The pair soon developed a plan. A two-pronged attack to deal with the sniper next time he made himself known.
The police chief was not happy about the pair not planning anything until the shooter was shooting again, but they had little information to go on. It would be faster, based on the frequency of his attacks.
Spaceman dug out his rifle from in his duffle bag. Assembled it and loaded it. H was going to take up a position in the lower part of the city, hoping to see the shooter, possibly relay his location to Rabbit who was now armed with his favorite shotgun and would b0 in the upper part of the city, where the shooter liked to operate. Armed and ready the tricky part was now getting into position without being seen. So dressed in plain clothes the two set out. Spaceman was wearing some sneakers, gym shorts and a sports jersey so that his large duffle bag didn’t look so ominous. He kept his rifle packed away carefully inside. Wrapped with more gym clothes. He walked seven blocks, to the laundry mat. Where after walking casually into the laundry mat he started a load of gym socks and then once the other two occupants of the building had left, he took the opportunity and seclusion to climb through an access hatch to the roof and nestled down in-between the two massive swamp coolers on the roof of the laundry mat. Rabbit slapped on a fake mustache, a v neck with a scarf, some tight jeans, loafers with no socks and fake glasses, and then picked up his guitar case. He had “borrowed” the case from the evidence room at the police station and ripped the form-fitting foam liner out, and put his shotgun in the guitar case and with one hand in his pocket and the other on the guitar case he stepped out of the police station with slightly exaggerated feet shuffling swagger.
Rabbit weaved his way uphill, toward the area the shooter inhabited. The two of them were doing this without back up from the local law enforcement. They would be to easily exposed and would be putting more lives at risk than necessary. Then they were going to wait until the sniper showed himself again. Rabbit wandered through the side streets, wandered back and forth, hung in the shadows where he could but not so much as to make his avoidance obvious. Spaceman stayed snug in the shadows in the roof. The heat vented from the A/C units he was between was becoming intense though. He used the clothed from inside the gym bag to insulate himself as best he could. He lay sweating heavily as he reassembled his rifle. Screwing the silencer down tightly and very deliberately loading his magazines. Spaceman sat for four hours, sweating furiously. He was starting to become light-headed. Rabbit continued to wander, shuffling back and forth past a condemned building that used to be an auto parts store. Crossed the street past a pizza shop, he could smell the oily pizza from the street. Spaceman shifted, and scratch his forearm with the stubble of his three-day beard.
Rabbit waited for an old beat-up truck with three dented fenders and a fading blue paint to make a slow turn through the intersection, as it past rabbit stepped into the crosswalk a single shot thundered through the valley. Rabbit froze, and looked about, then realizing he was still standing in the middle of the street, finished his crossing and stood at the corner. By the pizza shop, across the street from Spaceman’s laundromat. Rabbit spoke into his wristwatch which had a hidden radio.
“You hear that?”
“Yes Rabbit, I think the whole damned city heard it. I think it came from the North East.”
No sooner had Rabbit finished speaking when a second shot thundered out. A massive deep boom. Rabbit could tell where it came from too. He wove through the cars in the parking lot at the pizza place and headed up the hill. Past a small lumber yard. Shortly a third shot rang out, and the sirens from the police station could be heard. Rabbit sped up his pace. Spaceman shifted, trying to get a better angle, but had no luck.
Grudgingly he scooted forward, so he could get a better angle, but this exposed his rifle, head and shoulders to the sunlight and made him visible to his still unseen opponent. Rabbit was jogging now, clutching his guitar case to his chest, his sockless loafers slapping the sidewalk as he went. He covered a good half mile, real fast.
An ambulance sped past him, up the steepest part of the hill. Rabbit winced knowing that someone was hurt, or worse, multiple someones. Rabbit turned the corner at the top of the hill to follow the ambulance. Spaceman came over the radio.
“I see him. He is in the bell tower, of the church, just a little downhill, to your northeast. I’ve got no shot, I can only see the barrel of his rifle sticking out over the ledge.”
Rabbit breathlessly changed course, hopping over a fence, outrunning a chained dog, and pulling his equipment from the guitar case as he went. The belt and the bandolier came out first, he threw them over his shoulder with his free hand and then pulled the shotgun from his case. And dropped the case. While clutching the shotgun with one hand as he tightened his belt and the bandolier over shoulders on the way. Once those were secured, he flipped the folding stock out on his shotgun, shouldered it and cycled the pump. Chambering the first in the long line of slugs. As he ran, he padded his battle belt, made sure his pistol was there, his medkit, and the other junk on his battle belt.
By now his fake glasses and lame-ass fedora had fallen off. He removed the fake mustache too. He lept, lifted both feet forward smashing through some nice trimmed shrubberies. He stood over a fifty-yard stretch down the church parking lot. He would be exposed. Rabbit radioed to Spaceman.
“I’m in position, but there is too much open ground, I can’t get to him. What should we do?”
“I have no shot, and I don’t want to spook him, he could go to ground, then we would be back to square one, or worse. I can still see he is still facing the Northeast, you should be good. I doubt he will see you.”
Rabbit keyed his mic, to say something, but unable to decide whether to joke, curse or pray he said nothing and went off the air again. Spaceman heard the moment of static and could feel what Rabbit was doing.
“I’ve got you buddy”
Rabbit leapt from is hiding place and thundered down the slope to the parking lot his feet thumping heavy and hard with each footfall. He could feel his heart pounding, almost pushing too much blood through his veins he could feel it, pushing its way through his neck, into his brain. Which was busy thinking, of everything all at once. Hoping, pleading with something more powerful than himself, asking that he makes it safe to the church. His mind was pounding faster than his feet. Of the likely layout of the interior of the Church. Of the bad guy, of the sniper, and his fast shooting.
Rabbit was surprised when he reached the building and thumped against its wall. The blood still pounding in his neck. He skirted the edge of the building and came to the front door, big and heavy and wooden with a cross emblazoned awning. Rabbit paused and then decided it wasn’t best to go through the front door. He had to find an alternate entrance. He kept going, keeping tight up against the wall, moving right under the sniper's nose. He rounded the corner, passed under the stained glass and around the corner again. He found another door. Of regular size, it was metal, Rabbit pulled the handle and swung the door open. Pushing his way past the push bar latch with his hip. He entered the building and thumbed the safety off of his shotgun.
It was dark inside. The air was clearly stirring. Rabbits breathing felt loud and painful in the air. Like the whole church could hear him/ fortunately the church was empty. Or seemed that way. Until the windows seemed to shake and dust drifted down from the raters as another round went off. A deep thumping clanging metallic blast, it sounded of blood.
Rabbit’s head snapped upwards. He could immediately see the faint outline of a man in the shadows and the light among the rafters. The action on the man’s rifle operated. Ejecting a spent casing, it tumbled down through the rafters, from the weapon. Before it hit the smooth wooden floor. There was a fresh round in the chamber and h action was closing. The hammer was dropping and the church was filled with ringing, even though its bell was just a decoration. It was then that Rabbit realized this was an old, single shot falling block rifle. He was almost dumbstruck by the man’s deftness and speed. He was certainly well-practiced.
He deftly thumbed a load of buckshot into the magazine and cycled the pump. Catching the ejected slug with the other hand and popping it back into the magazine before shouldered his shotgun and letting fly. The hot load of OOO buck filled the air. It was like unloading all six from a really hot magnum revolver at the same time. The Rafters showed splinters down into the cherry wood benches of the church as the building absorbed the punishment. The tight group at this shorter range was spot on. Only two of the big heavy pellets punished the building, the other four punished the man with the full auto falling block.
Finding his crouched form, hitting the shooter's ankle, his calf, his thigh, his hip. The big powerful rounds shattered his bones and knocked him from his perch amongst the rafters. He fell the solid eighteen feet into the seats, and more bones broke. The pump on Rabbits shotgun had cycled before the shooter hit the chamber’s floor. His rifle clattered across the smooth stone between the seats next to the fallen.
Rabbit approached the man, he was tall dirty blonde though it was cut very short, only slightly longer the stubble on his face that did nothing to hide his crooked nose, and his recessed eyes were shadowed and haunted. They looked confused like he wasn’t sure whether to be angry, insulted, or scared. There was something back there moving, behind his eyes. A small but fast machine like a meat grinder. He wasn’t going to stop though, he was trying to sit up. Reaching for a big knife on his belt, as he grasped its hilt and drew it from its sheath he made eye contact with Rabbit. Rabbit could feel the manic crazy driving this man. It was oozing from him like a leaky oil drum. Then Rabbit shot him again.
Rabbit Radioed Spaceman. “I got him, let’s get gone before anything else happens.”
“Anything else happens? We just got the bad guy.”
“Yes, but I shot him, twice, in a church! I got a bad feeling about this, let’s make quiet and git outta here. Reaaal quick like.”
“Yea, fine, I hear ya… I’ll meet you at the safe house and will boogey, a’ight fooo.”
“We don’t need the fame or glory anyway. Were supposed to be covert, let the cops take the glory, well get out before seeing another soul.”
P.S. That's it, there is no more out of the first collection of the adventures of Spaceman and Rabbit. There were planned parts 2,3 and 4 that take place after the fed com civil war... I'll have to look and see if any of them have stories that are complete and/ or worth posting. Thanks for the reads. it's hart warming that my old writing is so well viewed. I hope this is a good sign for the new writing.